Blackbird Poem by Xiao Kaiyu

One day, in a primary school room

I learned this noun.

That evening I saw its black wings

unfold from the sky, like a parachute

fall with a feeling of hovering,

covering the bodies of me and my little sister.

Ai, from under the walnut tree in the yard my little sister

hesitantly walked into her bedroom,

into the maw of a huge blackbird.

Later in a different land, among the ruins of an old building

on the wall of my heart I saw a flock of them

suddenly fly up like a premonition of death

like a black cloud, and thought of my little sister.

She got married to a man,

on the home village's short, one-and-only street,

in a grocery shop.